Ekushe Dirgho Jibi Hok!

We should never ever forget 21 February 1952, the day history was made when cultural nationalism triumphed over Mohammed Ali Jinnah's bogus Islamic nationalism. On that day, Bangla emerged victorious in its battle against Urdu, drenched in the blood of young martyrs of Dhaka University.

On this glorious day, I greet Bangalis across the world and salute the martyrs of Ekushe February. Joy Bangla!



Bangla'r maati, Bangla'r jol...

O Amar Sonar Bangla...

Childhood memories of Kaal Boishakhi

Lost evenings of Kaal Boishakhi
There was no intimation of a storm when I left home for work last Thursday. It was only after I hit National Highway 24, which is an apology for an inter-State highway that mocks at our tall claims of ‘progress’ and ‘development’, that I spotted the dark, menacing storm, roaring across the highrise-dotted dust plains that separate Delhi from Uttar Pradesh. Within seconds an all-engulfing darkness descended at high noon and gale force winds swept down, whooshing their way through malnourished trees and scrub, scooping up dirt and millions of discarded plastic bags, and sending them swirling in the gathering gloom. It was not a pretty sight to see garbage and filth of various descriptions, dumped every day along the highway as part of an officially endorsed waste disposal ‘system’, being tossed around.
Mercifully, the rain came soon after. First there were fat drops that plonked dully on the windscreen and turned into streaks of black-brown grime. There was a distant roll of thunder, and then the skies opened up, sending a downpour that came crashing like a sheet of water. Within seconds, the stench of festering garbage had been washed away and the plastic bags had disappeared, weighed down by the rain. By the time I crossed Nizamuddin Bridge into Delhi, the roads were flooded and traffic was crawling at a speed lower than usual. Everybody was cranky, which was not unusual. It rained for the next couple of hours, and then drizzled for a long while.
Later that night, the roads looked fresh and clean, with puddles glistening under streetlights and the damp air redolent with the smell of rain. I rolled down the car windows and breathed deeply. You can’t do that very often in this part of the country. For all its pretensions of being ‘world class’, the National Capital Region, barring Lutyens’ Delhi, is really a sprawling, polluted concrete slum, pock-marked by ghastly glass-and-chrome malls. Next day’s newspapers described the thunder squall as “unseasonal rain” and carried photographs of stalled autorickshaws, cars, buses and trucks with motorcyclists trying to clamber over and across them.
Similar storms at this time of the year are joyously greeted in the eastern hinterland, especially in rural Bengal where they herald the advent of summer. As Choitro gives way to Boishakh, marking the end of spring, Kaal Boishakhis, or nor’westers, make their annual, almost ritual, appearance. The skies turn dark, egrets take flight, their sparkling white plume standing out in sharp contrast to the ink black clouds, and the wind comes roaring, whistling through coconut and palm trees, in a strong blast that lasts for about five to ten minutes. This is followed by a sharp drizzle that drenches the soil, dampens the air and cools the evening breeze which makes east India so very different from the rest of the country, more so Delhi, India’s dust bowl.
Decades ago, while growing up in Jamshedpur, my friends and I would wait for Kaal Boishakhis with bated anticipation. The immediate hour after a Kaal Boishakhi would be spent collecting green mangoes, raw and sour, which were otherwise forbidden, torn off their tender stalks by the raging wind. There was something Darwinian about the mango trees in our colony: The fittest fruit survived the frenzied storms of Boishakh to mature into delightfully sweet mangoes in the scorching heat of Joishtho. But they never tasted as good as the forbidden fruit.
It was during those years of growing up in a small Singhbhum town that we learned the art of grating a seashell on a rock with a rough surface to fashion a peeler for the green mangoes we would surreptitiously collect from Mrs Chowdhury’s garden. She had a dog whom she fed Ovaltine and milk for breakfast; Badshah slept all the time and wagged his tail furiously while we stole Mrs Chowdhury’s mangoes. She would be busy dusting her house — which she kept spotlessly clean — after the storm. Even if Badshah barked, which was a rarity and I can’t recall having heard him bark even once, she wouldn’t have heard him. As soon as a Kaal Boishakhi would pass, Mrs Chowdhury would switch on her gramophone at full volume and listen to Rabindrasangeet on 78 rpm records. Her favourite was ‘Esho hey Boishakh, esho esho...”
On Kaal Boishakhi evenings, dinner would be predictable — and, I guess, they still are predictable in Bengali homes that have not traded their Bangaliana for tandoori chicken and daal makhni. It would invariably arrive on the table in the form of steaming khichuri, begun bhaja and papor bhaja. The highlight of the meal would be an omelette. On some nights, the omelette would be replaced by fried hilsa from Kolaghat. Many years later, I was invited to a dinner hosted by a professor at University of California, Berkley. He and his wife had sought to recreate the ambience of a post-Kaal Boishakhi dinner. There was ‘Esho hey Boishakh, esho esho...’ playing on his hi-fi system, curtains had been drawn to shut out the bright evening light, and there was much rustling of brocade and Banarasi silk. Instead of hilsa, they served crisply fried American shad with khichuri made with aromatic Basmati rice. The professor recalled his childhood in Birbhum, of how he would run wild in paddy fields with his friends as a Kaal Boishakhi raged. Later, he wept copiously into his tumbler of bourbon. The charms of America had obviously proved more seductive for him than the harsh climes of Birbhum.
Just as the ersatz benefits of living in Delhi stops me from going back to the land of Kaal Boishakhis where I could teach my daughters how to make peelers from seashells and they could smell the fragrance of rain-sodden earth while collecting green mangoes and chasing dragonflies in the purple light of east India’s dusk before settling down for a steaming meal of khichuri, begun bhaja and omelette, listening to the strains of ‘Esho hey Boishakh, esho esho…’ playing on a neighbour’s gramophone.

07 April, 2008

Bangali's fascination for chicken

A chicken and egg story

Lost cuisine: Bengalis have discarded their Bangaliana
In Purnima Thakur's delightful little book, Thakurbari'r Raanna, which is all of 97 pages, a huge variety of recipes, ranging from shuktani (vegetable stew) to aam-rosune'r kaasundi (mango-garlic chutney), have been listed. Many of the preparations were presumably popular in the Tagore household at Jorasanko and have a distinct 'eideshi' flavour compared to food as it is cooked and relished east of Padma. Purnima Thakur, known as Bubu'di among her myriad admirers, has included 60 recipes for cooking fish, twice the number of recipes for cooking meat, in her book. Interestingly, of the 31 recipes for cooking meat, only five recommend chicken as the main ingredient -- murgi'r rezaala, Peshowari murgi, murgi'r cutlet, Madrasi murgi'r curry and Filipini murgi'r curry. The first two are what we refer to as 'mughlai dishes', the third and fourth are of Anglo-Indian vintage, while the fifth is clearly of Filipino origin.
This preference for mutton over chicken is not surprising. Till as recently as the mid-20th century, Bengali bhadralok Hindus would not touch chicken or eggs -- both were seen as 'Muslim food' or food meant for the mlechchho, both Muslim and Christian. Even Anglicised Bengalis who flaunted their disdain for conservative Hindu society by eating beef and cooking the prohibited meat at home, would not allow chicken to be served on their tables, leave alone consume it. If poultry had to be consumed to keep up with the Europeans, it was duck meat and duck eggs. The Brahmos were more liberal and chicken was served at some Brahmo homes (that would explain the inclusion of recipes to cook chicken in Thakurbari'r Raanna), but it had to be cooked in a separate kitchen, most often in the courtyard. Later, this became the practice in most Bengali bhadralok Hindu households, although women rarely touched chicken or eggs; their bias against both did not, however, dampen their enthusiasm for maachhe'r jhaal and mangsho'r jhol.
The decline and fall of the Bengali bhadralok samaj and the rise of neo-liberalism and the boxwallah culture, best exemplified by Mani Shankar Mukherjee's Seemabaddha (Satyajit Ray later made an eponymous film based on this novel) that militated against established notions of caste and community, saw the erosion of barriers that kept chicken and eggs away from the middle class Bengali's dining table. In recent years, increased awareness of red meat's detrimental impact on health has contributed to the preference for white meat, most notably chicken, in Bengali, as in non-Bengali, households. A third factor that has contributed to popularising poultry in a State where it was pro-actively shunned is the often pathetic attempt by Bengalis to discard that which is integral to their culture and ape others. Traditional Bengali wedding feasts served on fresh banana leaves have now made way for catered food that includes chholey, panir and tandoori chicken and is served on chipped china. Mouth-watering chochchori has been replaced by chili chicken. Even the snootiest of Bengalis are not untouched by this strange metamorphosis of Bengal's eating habits. The venerable Marxist economist Ashok Mitra once told me that he felt perfectly at home in Delhi's Banga Bhavan because they served an "excellent chicken curry".
There is, therefore, need for neither surprise nor shock on account of West Bengal's Nadia district primary school council's decision to continue to serve chicken curry to children as part of their midday meal provided by Government. In normal circumstances, this would be seen as a grand gesture, since in States like Uttar Pradesh, gruel fit for consumption by cattle is served as midday meal to school children. But these are not normal times in West Bengal where avian influenza, or bird flu, has been detected in 11 districts; Nadia is one of them. Mr Bibhas Biswas, chairman of Nadia district's primary school council, insists that the State Government has banned the sale and purchase of chicken, but not the "consumption of fowl curry". The wise man could have also cited the National Egg Co-ordination Committee's advisory that chicken, even if it is infected with the H5N1 virus, cooked at 70o C is safe for human consumption. That he hasn't is symptomatic of the West Bengal Government's terrifying non-response to the snow-balling crisis caused by H5N1-infected chickens dropping dead in district after district. The virus is now knocking on Kolkata's door.
Ever since the outbreak of bird flu was first detected in a little-known place called Hargram a fortnight ago, the CPI(M)-led regime has demonstrated its incapacity to deal with a disaster situation. Not only has the Government been found to be unprepared -- a fortnight later scarcity of protective gear continues to prevent health workers from venturing forth in many affected areas -- it has once again allowed local Marxist cadre to subvert local administration. The official ban on transporting chickens and eggs out of the bird flu-hit districts is being flouted with impunity because the poultry trade is controlled by the party apparatchiki, as is all trade and business in the districts. And so the deadly virus continues to travel from district to district, although it could have been contained, as was done in Maharashtra where the State Government restrained the virus to three kilometres of the two places where it was detected.
The sheer unpreparedness of the State Government to deal with bird flu, despite there having been enough warnings and sufficient time, not to mention funds, also stands exposed by the methods of culling that have been adopted -- they are cruel and dehumanising. Health workers are decapitating terrified and squawking chickens by pulling off their heads, and in the process getting splattered with their infected blood. In Bolpur, 10,000 newly-hatched chicks have been buried alive. As if this were not bad enough, the bird flu outbreak has once again brought to the fore the corruption that prevails in West Bengal's CPI(M)-controlled panchayats. People are reluctant to hand over infected chickens for culling because they are not too sure the local panchayat will hand over the Rs 40 per bird compensation. Already there are reports of poultry owners who have had their chickens culled being told by party dadas they should not expect more than Rs 30 per bird, possibly Rs 25, that is as and when compensation is actually doled out, if at all.
Meanwhile, at Alimuddin Street, CPI(M) leaders are busy calculating the impact of avian influenza on this summer's panchayat election. Even if they were to ensure poultry owners get the compensation that is due to them, it would be less than half of what they would have earned from the culled chickens. The H5N1 virus may succeed in achieving what the Opposition could not manage. Let's wait and watch.